Note 1 — Chapter IX · Of the Morals of Jesus Christ.

Certainly the birth of the world has a thousand times more probability in his Timaeus than in Genesis, and it cannot be said that that comes from what Plato had read in the books of the Jews during his travels in Egypt, for according to St. Augustin himself, (Confessions, Book 7, ch. 9, v. 20,) Ptolemy had not yet translated them. The description of the country of which Socrates speaks to Simias in the Phaedon (?) has infinitely more grace than the Terrestrial Paradise (of Eden) and the Androgynus1 is without comparison, better conceived than what Genesis says of the extraction of Eve from one of the sides of Adam. Is there anything that more resembles the two accidents of Sodom and Gomorrah than that which happened to Phaeton? Is there anything more alike than the fall of Lucifer and that of Vulcan, or that of the giants cast down by the lightnings of Jupiter? Anything more similar than Samson and Hercules, Elijah and Phaeton, Joseph and Hippolitus, Nebuchadnezzar and Lycaon, Tantalus and the tormented rich man (Luke xvi, 24), the manna of the Israelites and the ambrosia of the Gods? St. Augustin—quoted from God, Book 6, chap. 14,—St. Cyrile and Theophylactus compare Jonah with Hercules, surnamed Trinsitium (?Trinoctius), because he had dwelt three days and three nights in the belly of a whale. The river of Daniel, spoken of in the Prophets, ch. vii, is a visible imitation of Periphlegeton, which is mentioned by Plato in the Dialogue on the “Immortality of the Soul.”